Beat Detective

[MessianicDreams]

So I use BD quite a bit in PT to tighten stuff up, and I've had this nagging question in my head for a while. I've asked a few different engineers, most of whom have given me different answers.

For some reason Beat Detective doesn't always place the triggers at the start of where the kick/snr strike happens (see attached screenshot). In that picture, you can clearly see that for some reason BD has arbitrarily decided that it will use the OHs as a reference point, which of course is slightly delayed from the actual snare hit. I suppose what would then happen is when the edit smoothing happens, the actual initial impulse of the snare hit will get mangled in some crossfade - I suppose you could get around that using the "trigger pad" bit in the Region Separation function of BD. Either way, you're still not getting the hit straight on the beat as you'd expect BD to do for you.

So my question is this - if you're BD'ing a whole drum kit, do you go through every single trigger point? I've found a decent percentage of them are slightly off, and I'm not sure whether I should be worrying about it. It *sounds* OK I suppose but I just feel a bit lazy if I were to ignore it, yet it makes the process much amount longer! Also, is there some way of making BD's job easier?

Or am I being just a tad too anal about the whole deal? I just seem to be spending half my life staring at those bloody yellow lines and zoomed in wave forms. And yes - I know - the easy solution is to get a good drummer. But those are few and far between!

[Jorock]

I dont remember the exact reason for this, but it was explained to me once, however I do know the quick solution. When you select the beat separation mode in Beat Detective, set a pad time of roughly 7-9ms and it will chop your audio this set amount before the line beat detective places at each drum hit, you can adjust accordingly, and make sure you havent chopped any audio on any of the other hits.

[Wireneck]

Call me crazy but I go in and separate the regions manually. A lot of the stuff I record is pretty busy drum wise so I don't trust my beat detective skills to do the work for that portion.